Even When

Even when I'm at my lowest, even when the game seems played before, even when darkness seems more present than hope; the river flows.  My eyes are crusty, they burn from the fires from which I tried to view reality.  My knees strain, they carry a weary body, and the burden.  

Even when I am lost in my own head, where thoughts carry way too much of my attention.  Even when I fall short; the river flows.  My head twitches, my weight scares me, my throat is still sore.  

Even when I'm dead; the river flows.  Before and beyond a temporary scare, before a twisted body, there is hope; for you, for me, for everything.  

I had just been looking at the wrong symbols.  They only bound me, into chains, while I thought I was innovating.  But, when I close my eyes, I hear a distant sound of trickling water, the water of life.  I give pause, considering what I hear.  Could there be more here?  I must tune in; the trickle becomes a bubbling, becomes a brook, becomes a stream, becomes a river, becomes a lake, becomes an ocean, becomes everything.  My broken back and strained eyes receive their balm.  Not in the innovation of my crafty mind, or in the promise of a new healing, but in the Presence.  The One who has been, will be and is.  Through which time ceases and my soul is finally home.  My death, that I died in was speaking from the wrong set of presuppositions.  There was another story being told, right under my nose.  From within and without.  Healing exists.  Hope is real.  It is the fabric of reality; I tried to build my castle, all the while a home already existed.  Let me not be my own pain, my own undoing.  

Let my head and heart rest in the eternal story, the one that can only be spoken of in metaphor, and yet is truer than any definition of it.